PlayStation head doesn’t think Call of Duty aligns with the ‘standard Nintendo audience’
The Microsoft Vs. FTC legal battle has been full of all sorts of drama, crazy moments, embarrassing discussions and more, and there’s sure to be plenty of other notable comments as the week rolls on.
If you’ve been following along, you know that Nintendo has actually come up quite a bit in the legal discussions so far. While most of the conversation centered on what Call of Duty on Switch would be like and how the Switch in general should be classified, Sony wants everyone to know that Nintendo fans don’t even care about the franchise.
PlayStation boss Jim Ryan doesn’t consider Nintendo a direct competitor to Sony’s console, and to some degree that’s correct. Obviously the Switch and PS5 are in competition with one another in the general games market, but in terms of hardware and specs overall, the two platforms are incredibly different. That said, for Sony to ignore what Nintendo does with their hardware would certainly be to their great peril.
Should Microsoft succeed in purchasing Activision Blizzard, they’ve already pledged to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo platforms with feature parity. Sony thinks this doesn’t really matter, as when Ryan was asked about why previous Call of Duty titles on Nintendo platforms didn’t perform well, he shared the following:
I’m sure there are plenty of Nintendo fans who would argue that the lack of feature parity was a big reason for skipping over Call of Duty on Nintendo platforms. Along with that, many Nintendo followers feel Call of Duty on Nintendo platforms has always been an afterthought, and never really given the attention it needs in terms of development.
Would a full-fat Call of Duty game perform well on Switch or subsequent Nintendo systems? I guess we’ll have to see how the Microsoft legal battle goes to find out!